The Producers

Mel Brooks’ tale has already had two successful incarnations; expecting a third just may be greedy.

By:Jay Boyar
   Watching The Producers — the new film based on the smash stage musical — reminded me why Mel Brooks stopped making movies more than a decade ago.
   In duds like Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) and Life Stinks (1991), it was obvious that the funnyman-filmmaker had lost his movie groove. And to judge from the new film, his movie groove remains missing.
   Longtime fans of Brooks (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles) will remember that The Producers began life nearly four decades ago as a low-budget film starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. It marked Brooks’ debut as a film director and writer. While far from a critical coup — The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it largely an exercise in "stupidity" and "rank incompetence" — it became a hit, won Brooks an original-screenplay Oscar and eventually was enshrined as a comedy classic.
   When Brooks reworked the material as the 2001 stage musical starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, he enjoyed a stratospheric commercial success (and that time the critics were on board). But if that happens this time around, it’ll be the biggest joke of all.
   It’s a little unfair to blame Brooks for all the new movie’s faults. Although he co-produced and co-wrote it, the director is Susan Stroman, who won Tonys for directing and choreographing the Broadway production.
   The new Producers is an unfortunately all-too-faithful version of the stage show, a film in which Stroman attempts something as uncomplicated as it is miscalculated. She doesn’t exactly adapt the play to the screen. Instead, she tries to come as close as possible to recording a stage performance on film.
   At two hours and 14 minutes, it’s a very long sit. (The original film was a scant 88 minutes.) What we see is a cast of characters, often in close-up, broadly mugging as if they were playing to theater-goers seated in the last row of the balcony. In Brooks’ 1968 film, Mostel and Wilder were broad, too, but their exaggerated performances were demented comic abstractions, almost like something out of Ionesco. In the new film, Lane, Broderick and the others often appear simply to be shouting.
   The basic plot hasn’t changed much since the ’60s. Max Bialystock (Lane), a washed-up, if bombastic, theatrical producer, and Leo Bloom (Broderick), a mousy accountant-turned-producer, hatch a risky scheme. They oversell shares in a new play to the tune of $2 million, being careful to select the worst script, director and star they can find.
   The play, Springtime for Hitler, is a love letter to the Third Reich, complete with goosestepping dancers and a heroic Hitler. Assuming it flops, Bialystock and Bloom can pocket the money. But if, by some fluke, it should succeed, they’ll end up in jail.
   Mel Brooks was no camera wizard when he directed the original Producers. But that was, visually speaking, a much less demanding film. The very fact that the new movie is a full-blown musical — with a large cast and several elaborate production numbers — calls for the kind of cinematic virtuosity that Stroman plainly lacks. If you saw her stage musical, you know it was enormously entertaining. Does anything survive?
   Well, yes, some gags still work. (For some reason, the line "Many different herrings" always gets me.) Some of the songs, which Brooks wrote, are still fun, especially the bizarrely lyrical "Springtime for Hitler" and the funny-romantic "Prisoners of Love," both of which go back to the original film. There’s also the hilarious, if politically incorrect, "Keep It Gay" and the teutonic-jaunty "Haben Sie Gehort das Deutsche Band."
   Will Ferrell sings the latter, and his performance as the mad Nazi playwright who pens Springtime for Hitler may be the best thing in the movie. Ferrell brings the right kind of hyperbole — the crazy kind — to the production.
   Also a delight is Uma Thurman as Ulla, the producers’ luscious secretary-cum-chorine. She throws herself into the seemingly bubble-headed (but secretly savvy) character and makes it her own.
   As the ascot-wearing, unprincipled-but-lovable Bialystock, the irrepressible Nathan Lane gets by in a few scenes, even if his performance is, like almost everything else in this film, stage-scaled — that is, over-scaled. As Bloom, however, Matthew Broderick is a total disaster. Seen close-up, his overblown performance is often genuinely disturbing. Watching it is like sitting directly in front of the bass drum at a performance of the 1812 Overture.
   Rounding out the cast are Gary Beach as Roger De Bris, the flaming director of Springtime for Hitler, and Roger Bart as his feline assistant. These obviously talented performers are, like so much in this film, undone by Stroman’s direction. Maybe nobody could have made a satisfying movie musical out of Brooks’ material. After all, The Producers has already had two successful incarnations. Expecting a third may just be greedy.
   Or maybe the movie’s failings are all an elaborate plan.
   Did somebody oversell shares in this film?
Rated PG-13. Contains sexual references and humor. 134 minutes.